We wanted to post these awesome Google Street View photos a long time ago, but somehow they got lost along the way. Luckily, I found them while reading Twisted Sifter. We tried our best to find more cool examples of Google Street View images, however almost every source was pointing to Jon Rafman.

Montreal based artist Jon Rafman isn’t the original photographer but instead he explores Google Street Views and takes screenshots of the most unusual and funny sights. The original images were taken by an army of Google’s hybrid electric automobiles, each one equipped with nine cameras on a single pole trying to photograph every highway and byway in the world. [Read more...]

“The world captured by Google appears to be more truthful and more transparent because of the weight accorded to external reality, the perception of a neutral, unbiased recording, and even the vastness of the project,” said Jon in his interview to Art Fag City.

“With its supposedly neutral gaze, the Street View photography had a spontaneous quality unspoiled by the sensitivities or agendas of a human photographer. It was tempting to see the images as a neutral and privileged representation of reality—as though the Street Views, wrenched from any social context other than geospatial contiguity, were able to perform true docu-photography, capturing fragments of reality stripped of all cultural intentions.”

Without further ado, here are 36 strangest and funniest Google Street View photos from Jon Rafman’s collection with a couple of our own finds.